Have iPod, Will Secretly Bootleg

Have iPod, will travel with bootleg software, it seems. From a story via Slashdot, comes a story from Wired, where it appears that, at least one enterprising teenager has found a new use for his iPod, ripping off a copy of Office for OS X installed on a Mac's within his local CompUSA.

One user, Kevin Webb, at his local CompUSA was shocked to see a teenager, with an iPod, walk up to an iMac, plug in the iPod into the FireWire port, and within a minute or so, had copied just over 200mb of the Office X for Mac OS X software onto the 5gb hard drive inside the iPod.

Webb watched the teenager copy a couple of other applications as he headed to find a CompUSA employee. "I went over and told a CompUSA guy, but he looked at me like I was clueless," Webb said.

Unsure whether the kid was a thief or an out-of-uniform employee, Webb watched as he left the store. "I thought there's no point in getting any more involved in this imbroglio," Webb said. "Besides, this is Texas. You never know what he might have been carrying."

While the iPod has a built-in anti-piracy mechanism that prevents music files from being copied from one computer to another, it has no such protections for software.

When installing Office, users simply drag and drop the Office folder to their hard drive. Everything is included, including a self-repair mechanism that replaces critical files in the system folder, unlike Windows, which can rely on a bunch of system files that are only installed during an installation process; simply copying an application from one machine to another will not work.

"This is the first we have heard of this form of piracy," said Erik Ryan, a Microsoft product manager. "And while this is a possibility, people should be reminded that this is considered theft."

News source: Wired.com